Perito Moreno National Park

GENERAL INFORMATION OF THE AREA

Perito Moreno (Perito Moreno National Park) was created in 1937in order to protect the large richness of the region: “lengas” forests, two lake's systems, a patagonic steppe section, fossils and a varied fauna.The Park covers a 115.000 hectares surface in the northwest side of Santa Cruz. It has a mountain chain cuts by valleys, which many of them are 900 metres over the sea level.Belongs to forests, patagonic steppes and Altos Andes eco-regions. The last characterizes by a hills and slopes chain on top of Puna's plains. The weather is cold, with permanents snows. The rains of the eco-region vary between 100 and 200 mm. The land is skinny and has an incipient evolution. The vegetation is composed by short bushes and creeping or “en cojin” species.

CULTURAL RESOURCES

The protected area was inhabit, 9.000 years ago, by groups of hunters and collectors. The occupation of the place was periodic and alternated between the steppe and the forest because that was part of a planning resource's using.One of the most important animals of the region was the guanaco. It was appreciate because of its meat, leather, bones, tendons and veins.The original groups used to live in caves. Later opened sky awnings replaced them, but specific activities like prepared and dyeing leather were done rocky eaves. Theses places were also used for hunting and for work the rocks. In accordance with archaeological registers the protected area of this Park was abandoned in the 18 th century, probably because of the climate's inclemency of a “short ice age” registered by important studies developed in 1750.PN Perito Moreno (Perito Moreno National Park) has a high scientific and cultural value, thanks to the phaleontological rests and biological elements that preserves. This Park has many evidence of this region's past, which began 9.700 years ago, and are the testimony that tehuelches ancestors left about their life, habits and beliefs.

NATURAL RESOURCES
Landscape, flora and fauna

The landscape was surrounded by many hills and mountains arranged from east to west and north to south that constitutes a great natural amphitheatre.The Park has three delimited sectors: the steppe, represented by dense “coironales” and examples of “mata torcida”, a transition zone with vegetation composed by “ñire” and “lenga”, and the forest, constituted by “lengas” that localized mostly in seaside zones of Nansen and Azara Lakes.The Park has an interesting fauna reserve. There are a lot of guanacos that move in groups. That largest predator is the puma and red and grey wolf. There are also the “choique”, “ñandu petiso”, “pilquin” or “chinchillon anaranjado”, a Santa Cruz restricted specie different from the rest of the “pilquines” of the Patagonia and the “esquivo huemul” that finds there a safety refuge. The local stag has a strong brown body; males have small bifurcate horns that are one metre height. In winter “huemules” descend from high slopes, finding refuges in forests and meals from the valleys.Many small little lakes, feed by thaw water, constituted the habitat were aquatic birds stay, like flamingos, “hualas”, “cisne cuello negro”, “patos vapor” and great concentrations of “cauquenes”. “Condor andino”, “aguila mora” and “ñacurutu” –a big owl that makes its nests in the Park- integrated the local “avifauna” that lives in the Park.Unlike many patagonic lakes, in Perito Moreno National Park waters there aren't exotics fishes, so there is only native “ictiofauna”.